We all have our own personal perspective that’s shaped by our culture, our surrounding, the influence from the others and all of the knowledge that we gained. This week in class we discussed about the different culture perspective. People from different countries, which have different cultures, can have different perspective including things like table manners and the way of talking.

But of course culture is not the only thing that affects our perspective. For example, I am 16 years old girl, and my age and my gender affect how I view the world. The perspective of a boy is very different from the perspective of the girl. A boy might be more interested in sports, cars and gaming while a girl will probably more likely to be interested in clothes, shopping and arty things. Same as the age, as we grow up, we gain more knowledge which can change our perspective. A child might view the world in a much simpler way while adults view the world in a much complicated way. Another example is our environment. I grew up in China so my mother tongue is Chinese but I am actually an American. My dad is from Taiwan and my mother is from Malaysia. Because the cultures in those four countries are so different, I need to get use to every culture and get familiar with those languages. And this makes my viewing of the world wider and makes my perspective more diverse from others.

So my perspective is affected and influence by many different factors such as age, gender, language, environment, and culture.

How does perspective affect how you see the world and your place in it?

Different people have different perspective of the world. Perspective means different viewpoints which can affect by the differences in our culture, religion, geography and politics. Although the world is always the same, we view it in different ways because of the different perspective we have. Our perspective is based on our knowledge. Those knowledges can be given by our parents, our teachers, our culture and our environments, but we can also learn it and gain it ourselves.

From the map activity that we did in class, I noticed that we all drew the map in a different way which also means that we view the map in a different way. The largest difference that I noticed was somehow the Chinese put Asia in the middle and the others put Europe and Africa in the middle. This is because those are the kind of maps that we grow up seeing it (See picture 1 and 2). I don’t think there is any wrong with placing yourself in the middle of your own map of the world. When we are younger, we put our family in the center of the universe, because that’s all we know. As we grow up our world view expand, we find out that we are not the only one in this world. Just like what King said during the discussion: “knowledge can make us feel small.” So our knowledges can affect how we see the world and also how we place ourselves in it.

There are also many other differences such as the details of the map. While most of the students in our class are Asian so that Asia is the continent that we are most familiar with and the one with most details, Victor drew South American with the most details because he’s from Brazil. As a Taiwanese I will definitely put Taiwan on the map, while other people might not even thought of Taiwan because it’s so small. The differences in our map can also due to the politics. In a Chinese map, they might put Taiwan as a province of China, but in a European or American map, they put Taiwan as a separate country. The different politics and educations can also change our view to the world.

I don’t think there is such thing as a correct or incorrect map, because we all have our own way of analyzing and presenting the map.